Dear developers,
As you may have seen [1], the NEW queue has again reached a one-month
backlog. While I have no doubt that the current FTP team will be able to
reduce that backlog, a bigger workforce would prevent such a situation
from happening at all.
Though I have already received a few offers to help, most of them
were from people already very deeply committed to other tasks in Debian,
which kind of defeats the idea of having fresh blood in the teams. Which
is not to say that their help is not being considered or appreciated,
but rather that I *also* would like to see more "new" people.
The tasks
---------
FTP assistant work consists of many small, atomic, shareable tasks,
amongst which:
- reviewing, accepting or rejecting packages in the NEW queue [2]
using ad-hoc tools [3]
- handling RM (removal) requests [4] (note that categorising and
reviewing these bugs is an important part of the job that does
not require any special powers, you may want to start doing that
if you wish to help; this is how Jeroen started, for instance)
- reporting illegal dependencies [5] (Anthony said last year that no
one was looking at these; it seems to remain true)
Interested?
-----------
If you are interested in becoming FTP assistant, you should:
- have some time
- immediately get familiar with as many of the tools and procedures
that you may have access to (such as dak [6]), ideally start working
on the tasks that do not require specific credentials
- contact me so that I can compile a list of people and make sure the
FTP team sees it
If you are amongst the people who already contacted me back in May
about this, you should not need contact me again, you are already in the
list, but it doesn't hurt confirming you're still interested and making
sure I did not miss you.
[1] http://users.alioth.debian.org/~corsac-guest/new/new-month.png
[2] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
[3] http://ftp-master.debian.org/~ajt/new/ (courtesy of Thomas Viehmann)
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=ftp.debian.org
[5] http://ftp-master.debian.org/unmet-deps/
[6] http://ftp-master.debian.org/bzr/debian-archive-kit/
Thanks in advance,
--
Sam.